Choosing people over algorithms

It seems to me there might be an emerging trend back towards human curation. LinkedIn’s new Pulse App features human curation, the same is true for Apple’s forthcoming news app, and Apple’s new music service similarly makes a big deal about it’s human editors, including former BBC Radio 1 favourite Zane Lowe.

Two of these examples are from Apple, making it early to generalise, but there’s definitely a strong meme that humans are better than algorithms when it comes to recommending content.

I wonder three things though:

whether large companies prefer human curation because it leverages one of their strengths vis a vis startups – capital

if this is more about positioning than substance – human curation sounds better to most consumers than recommendations from a machine

whether the real answer is a combination – human curation augmented via AI – we’ve made one investment on that basis and are considering another one now